publishing technologies international | www.cgs-oris.com

When you enter the company's facility located in Saarbrucken, close to the French border, not much resembles a traditional printing operation. No wonder, as Pirrot has over twenty years of experience and is a pioneer in digital printing. They always remained true to their philosophy to print en-tirely digitally. Instead of investing in offset presses, they rather con-tinuously expanded their services over the years from the early black-and-white printing. Today, they are a competent full-service provider with state-of-the-art machinery. Thanks to a positive order situation, more often than not the company is working to two-shift capacity. The majority of the customers are located in the States of Saarland and Rhine-land-Palatinate, some even in France. Until now, the company has no sales department; new customers are solely acquired by word-of-mouth recom-mendation. Since the company was established in 1992, word has quickly gotten around about quality, reliability and quick delivery. Today, the com-pany is the single point of contact in the region, when it comes to digital print production. The machinery is constantly updated to cover a wide pro-duction range. At Pirrot, machines are used a maximum of five years until they are replaced. The production focus is on four-color printing, but the business is also a publishing house, lettershop, textile finisher and large format printer. Thanks to comprehensive finishing capacities, even the most complex jobs can be entirely produced in-house. Moreover, there is a substantial paper storage. The client structure is as diverse as the products and services, ranging from individuals to local associations, to large in-dustrial enterprises. The company has adapted to the changed clientele:

"Until a few years ago, print data was prepared by prepress companies. Nowadays the majority of our customers do it themselves, and quite often, the data does not meet the requirements. That is why a comprehensive data check and client consultation is an inherent part of our extensive services, which come at no cost for the customer. For example, we advise the custom-er how to create a bleed or which substrate is the most suitable for his job. Thanks to our digital printing technology, we are able to produce a single advance copy, even if it is a voluminous job like an illustrated book. That way, the customer gets an identical sample, even before the actual print run is produced", explains Bjoern Frey, CEO of the company, which uses an iGen3, a DC 7000 and a DC 260 for four-color printing. For black-and-white, a high-capacity Xerox Nuvera is available. Recently, the firm has invested substantially in a large format printing department, which was moved to an extension of the building.

"Thanks to ORIS we deliver digital printing with proofing quality" Christian Weirich, Technik

SOMETIMES SUCCESS HAS THREE FATHERS: QUALITY, RELIABILITY AND ON-TIME DELIVERY

Christian WeirichTechnical Supervisor

»ORIS CASE STUDY«IN-DEPTH STUDY: ORIS PRESS MATCHER PRO ATDIGITALDRUCK PIRROT GMBH | SAARBRÜCKEN, GERMANY

Digitaldruck Pirrot GmbH, Saarbrucken, was one of the first digital printing companies in Germany. For color-accurate print results the company relies on ORIS Press Matcher.

Christian Weirich, head of technology, first became aware of the ORIS Press Matcher from CGS, when he visited the Postprint exhibition in Ber-lin. Just a few days later they spontaneously ordered the software by phone. "ORIS Press Matcher completely met our expectations right from the beginning. It was our goal to supply our customers with perfect re-sults, based on offset standards accepted in the market. Because if you like it or not, digital printing today has to measure up to an offset-like quality. Thanks to ORIS, we can now fulfill even the highest requirements regarding color accuracy, quality and repeatability on our main pro-duction machine, a Xerox iGen3. Not only that, we were even able to sig-nificantly improve the color stability and output quality of our smaller ma-chines from HP, Canon and Xerox.

Today, we can even supply our customers with a contract quality proof, which has been printed in advance on the particular press. Since we work with the ORIS software, we almost exclusively produce within the ISO-coated offset standard. We have also installed ORIS Certified Proof, to certify the prints and label them accordingly", explains Weirich. "Al-though we use the ORIS software only since a few months, it has quickly become the central hub for all color management processes. To avoid bottle necks, we use ORIS Press Matcher solely for that. Even separations from RGB to CMYK are mostly done with ORIS, since we have noticed that colors look distinctively more natural then. Our machines are mostly equipped with high-quality CREO Rips. How-ever, in the past we time and again had problems with processing orders

and unnecessary delays, as we had to make essential color corrections by very awkwardly altering gradation curves." The further steps at Digi-taldruck Pirrot are already planned: " Particularly the new possibility to create DeviceLink profiles in ORIS Press Matcher // Web, which in turn can be used directly in the CREO workflow of the iGen3, is extremely interesting for us, as we increasingly process customer mailings. For our customers, ranging from small associations to a big energy provider, we handle the entire direct mailing including personalization. Simultaneously we update things like pricing, for which we are using Printshop Mail, outputting via the CREO VPS data stream. With ORIS DeviceLink profiles, we can then use the superior color profile quality even for highly personalized variable data printing. Another step will be to connect our large format printers to the ORIS system as well, so we can guarantee a consistent color quality irrespective of the output device. It will even mean another improvement for us, since we can con-trol all color management processes with one single application then. If you look at the market in the recent past, two trends become apparent. Print products are only ordered when they are actually needed, which leads to drastically shorter print runs. At the same time, universal con-sistent quality and color is expected. Even an author, who publishes and prints 50 copies with us, expects the same quality comparable to offset with every copy. Thanks to ORIS color management, we can now meet these demands, so to speak, at the touch of a button", concludes Weirich.

"Our goal was to provide an even better service to our customers where print quality is concerned" Björn Frey, CEO

»DIGITAL PRINTING WITH PROOFING QUALITY«

publishing technologies international | www.cgs-oris.com

Established in 1985, CGS Publishing Technologies International GmbH, Hainburg, Germany, is a world leader in color proofing, productivity and production systems for the professional graphics arts market. Headquartered near Frankfurt, CGS also has operations in the US, Japan, Hong Kong, France, UK and Mexico, as well as sales and support partners throughout the world. More information can be found on the CGS web site, www.cgs-oris.com.